I need to stop, I whispered to myself & clicked 'add to cart'.

When was the last time you opened your favourite shopping app, spent time shortlisting the product you want to buy, added them to your cart and then didn’t come back for days?

Maybe some of you did this as recently as last night. And that is a very common user behaviour.

When I was working for Big Bazaar shopping app, our analytics told us a similar story:

• on average users were adding 12 items to the cart

• users opened the app 5 times before shopping

• The average time users took to shop was 3 days

These stats are for a grocery app.

Talk about fashion and the numbers will shift.

For one of the fashion brands I was managing below were the stats:

• On average people add 7 items to the cart

• On average people took 8 days to shop after adding an item to the cart

• Add to wishlist rate was 5x of add to cart

• The conversion rate from cart-to-sale was 17% while wishlist-to-sale was a meagre 0.8% (people clearly were not wishing to buy wishlist items)

• Purchase frequency was once in 3 months (which is standard in fashion category)

While these are important data points to study but the most critical behaviour for any e-commerce website is when people abandon the cart.

You work hard to show ads to the right people and spend months on SEO to show up for the right searches, get people to click on your ad or listing, people spend time finding the right product on your website, add them to the cart and just when you thought you are about to hit a sale. BOOM! they drop off to never come back.

Some of the top reasons why people abandon their carts are:

While this behaviour is common among users, adopting the right strategy to get users back on the site is not very common. Still, to date, very few e-commerce websites are able to get cart abandoners back on their site and persuade them to complete the buying journey.

Here are my top picks when it comes to converting users who ditch you at the cart stage:

Send an email within 20 minutes after the user abandons the cart:

When an e-commerce customer abandons their cart, you have a few minutes to reel them back in.

Assuming that you’re using some marketing automation technology and email marketing, send an email within 20 minutes.

According to Rejoiner’s data, here’s how likely a customer is to purchase after receiving a reminder:

Those first few minutes post abandonment are the golden window of opportunity to regain lost customers. Capitalize on it.

Give the customer clear progress indications:

It will help the customer if you can show them how far along in the process they are with a progress bar. Users like to have a feeling of progress and forward momentum as they reach for the goal of purchasing an item.

There are many types of progress bars you can show based on your website design:

Add a “Save For Later” Button

Many shoppers abandon their carts because they’re using them as a wishlist or a place to save things they want to buy later. Instead of funnelling them into a shopping cart, make it easy for them to create a wishlist with an easy option to buy later.

You get the benefit of lowered abandonment rates, and they get the upside of a wishlist that will easily funnel them into a later sale.

Once users add products to the wishlist, send them notifications telling them about the reviews of the product, the number of units left in stock, and special promotions to reel users back in & convert.

Highlight Your Return Policy

Have you ever experienced buyer’s remorse? Some buyers do. Buyer’s remorse doesn’t just happen after a purchase.

The anticipation of remorse can sometimes cripple buyers before they purchase.

To prevent this from happening, give customers a clear and easy understanding of your return policy. Make it simple. “Don’t like it? Just return it, to us. No questions asked.”

It is a kind of reassurance that you are there for the customer if they change their mind or if something goes wrong.

Limit Cross-Selling on the Checkout Page

Trying to cross-sell or upsell customers in the 11th hour may just contribute to shopping cart abandonment, not bigger buys.

Keep cross-selling to the product page and let the checkout page focus on converting.

Add Testimonials Everywhere

Some people put testimonials only on a devoted page.

I suggest putting them everywhere — even in your checkout process.

A simple callout or sidebar with a customer recommendation or two can keep the motivation level high as the customer continues to check out.

Don’t make testimonials clickable on the checkout, just let them be either in the image form or text-based.

Use logical marketing automation journeys

Firstly, get a marketing automation platform like, Clevertap, Webengage, Moengage or Netcore on board.

Once you integrate one of these tools with your website and app, sign up for an Email partner like Kenscio or Netcore to send out emailers.

Also, get an SMS partner like Gupshup or Route Mobile on board.

Get a WhatsApp vendor too like Route Mobile or yellow.ai

Once you build this robust stack of marketing automation, start setting up journeys.

One example of such a journey is:

If a user drops off from the cart page- send them a browser push notification or app notification in 10 minutes.

If a user does not convert from notification- send them an email in 20 minutes.

If a user doesn’t convert from this email, then send them an SMS.

If the user doesn’t convert from SMS then send a WhatsApp message.

Remember, cost-wise, an email will be the least expensive, and WhatsApp will be the most expensive so you have to be cautious while using WhatsApp.

Similarly set journey and triggers at various stages of your website and app.

People who sign up but do not shop- have a journey and triggers for them.

People who have not come to your website/app for a few days.

People who come to your website/app but do not add any product to the cart.

People who add products to a wishlist and do not shop.

You need to set up all of these actions as events on Clevertap or any one of the marketing autom
ation tools and then set triggers in the form of notifications, email, SMS, and WhatsApp to get people back to your website/app and convert.

Get smart with whitelisted offers

In Shopify, woo-commerce, Wix, you can set up whitelisted offers to specific customers.

A used case of this is:

Your website’s ATS (average ticket size) is ₹700. A customer has added products worth ₹3,000 to the cart but is not going ahead & shopping.

For all such users, create a segment of all the users who have added items worth more than ₹3,000 to the cart in the last 7 days, and create a conditional coupon code which will only be used against the phone numbers of these customers (this is known as whitelisting of coupon codes).

The condition in this code could be: get 20% off on shopping of more than ₹3,000.

Send out a communication to these users by email, SMS, notification and WhatsApp.

And package this coupon code as an exclusive code for ‘you’.

Whitelisted coupon codes provide exclusivity and an additional nudge to convert the users with higher ticket size.

That’s it for today folks.

Did you check out the reel I posted recently Debugging Nykaa’s SEO approach?

Here it is for easy reference:

If you wish to learn more fundamentals of digital marketing, sign up for the A to Z of digital marketing masterclass. We have an early bird offer running which is ending soon.

Have an awesome Sunday. Take care of yourselves and give yourself and much-deserved break.

Cheers,

Apurv